Lean / To

Useful Knowledge

noreply@blogger.com (mary) — Tue, 07 Feb 2012 00:06:00 +0000

Here is the actual ringtone, from pennsound.

Yo Yo Mr Such My Hand

noreply@blogger.com (mary) — Sun, 22 Jan 2012 22:00:00 +0000

I just started using Google voice, which transcribes all my voice messages and sends them to me in email form. Basically it's the latest version of the game “telephone.” Only better.

"A"

noreply@blogger.com (mary) — Wed, 04 Jan 2012 20:46:00 +0000

New Directions just released a new edition of Louis Zukofsky's "A." I'm reviewing it for MAKE, which has spurred me to finally read the entire book in its 800 page entirety. It's totally worth it.

Poem written while procrastinating

noreply@blogger.com (mary) — Wed, 28 Dec 2011 02:21:00 +0000

Ok, so I've decided once and for all that I'm going to put my own poems on this blog, because why the hell not. The only problem is, in the past when I've posted poems here I've gone back and deleted them later, since it usually takes me a week to decide that I don't like them after all. And unfortunately, I have no way of preventing my future self from doing that again with this one.

So I'm going to make a pact. I was listening to radiolab on the way to the annual Griffin family Christmas desert-not-dinner party, (a wonderful tradition) and there was a story of this woman who had tried her whole life to quit smoking. Tried, and failed. She was in her seventies I think, and had been a big civil rights activist in the sixties. So one day she told her friend that if she ever smoked another cigarette, she would donate $5,000 to the Ku Klux Klan. And it worked! Every time she wanted a cigarette she would think of the f***ing KKK, and get so grossed out that she wouldn't want one any more.

Now I don't have $5,000, but I swear right now to the internet that if I take this poem down (for reasons other than someone wants to publish it and so I have to) I will donate $50 to Rick Santorum. I'm for serious. If you don't believe that's enough of a deterrent, just look him up on the urban dictionary. Dude's a scumbag.

I've also decided to label them all "Mary Wilson Poems," in the hopes that I will one day overcome the google robots that will forever come up with Mary Wilson from The Supremes when someone googles my name.

(Nothing whatsoever against The Supremes, they're awesome.)

Another Saboteur

You’d written all over my book in the margins and at the very end you wrote
“The End.” The pocket guide to toolish possible behavior
went unheeded and ungrounded, went in your personal pocket with
the buried art of shedding light. And here I thought that I’d
been sent to you, as men are sent to other men for something
only senders comprehend. The book said simply
that the universe belongs to danger, truisms,
and arson. This advice had never until now been put to use.
I set a lighter to its binding. And you started hollering, as if I’d lit the
binding of your self-same pocket watch as if your very
soul was ticking, bounded or at least existing,
based on your behavior, which
is all that we can know about a person.

Rose Hobart

noreply@blogger.com (mary) — Thu, 22 Dec 2011 00:29:00 +0000

Well now I'm too sick-in-bed to write a word about Walter B., so instead I will just post the results of my latest internet time wasting binge. Which was comprised of the following e-steps:

responding to a email from my mom; realizing she'd uploaded a picture of an 8-ball for her gchat icon; finding that both adorable and surprisingly tech savvy; deciding to upload my own gchat icon; settling on a screenshot of the blue part of Joseph Cornell's "Toward the “Blue Peninsula” (For Emily Dickinson); remembering how much I love Joseph Cornell; re-watching his film "Rose Hobart" on youtube; deciding to post it on my blog; seeing that embedding was disabled; taking a screenshot of my favorite part; posting that to this blog; making the words "Rose Hobart" a link to the aforementioned movie, which Cornell made by cutting up an editing the 1931 B-Movie "East of Borneo." Why? Because he was obsessed with Rose Hobart.

Walter Benjamin Venn Diagram

noreply@blogger.com (mary) — Sun, 18 Dec 2011 21:20:00 +0000

From The Ground of Intentional Immediacy. This paper's gonna be a blast.

Prairies of My Masculine Epiphany

noreply@blogger.com (mary) — Sun, 11 Dec 2011 20:38:00 +0000

From Charles Bernstein, A Poetics:

All I want for christmas is for more writers to read this. Seeeeeriously.

And on that note,

Word Play

noreply@blogger.com (mary) — Tue, 15 Nov 2011 15:44:00 +0000

Dear Editor,

In the last sentence of your email, do you mean "wordplay?" Or is it the word "play" that is "strangely out of place?" If so you must be confused, since the word "play" does not appear in any of my poems, at least not physically, and so if you're suggesting it is present metonymically, or as some barely visible specter of "play," then such unbridled mysticism makes it hard to read your otherwise highly superior rejection letter.

Sincerely,

Helsinki

noreply@blogger.com (mary) — Sun, 13 Nov 2011 18:11:00 +0000

From Helsinki, by Peter Richards

Love is a Babe

noreply@blogger.com (mary) — Wed, 19 Oct 2011 00:25:00 +0000

Magic

noreply@blogger.com (mary) — Thu, 22 Sep 2011 16:59:00 +0000

From Walter Benjamin, "On Language as such and on the Language of Man"

Some Poems

noreply@blogger.com (mary) — Wed, 31 Aug 2011 17:15:00 +0000

I finally published something! Actually this happened like a month ago but it took me a while to get over it and share the link. These three are from the WORLD series, which as you may guess all have the word WORLD in the title. This I have found to be both gimmicky and productive. It's weird for me to see them out of order though, which has lead me to wonder whether I shouldn't just bill it as one long poem with, like, chapter headings or something. Can you do that? I don't know. Anyway,enough preface.

Mary Wilson - 3 Poems

Thanks to gobbetmag for publishing this, and if you're into it check out their other posts as well. There aren't many, and they are all (in my opinion) excellent.

From "Dear Body", by Dan Machlin

noreply@blogger.com (mary) — Wed, 24 Aug 2011 22:16:00 +0000

Brought to you/me by Ugly Duckling press. I'm way into it.

From "Alphabet," by Inger Christensen

noreply@blogger.com (mary) — Wed, 13 Apr 2011 23:40:00 +0000

100 Word Stories

noreply@blogger.com (mary) — Tue, 12 Apr 2011 19:18:00 +0000

Thanks to everyone who came out for the Craftland reading this Saturday, and especially thank you to Art Middleton for curating the amazing small book show (Magic Child Repository) and to Walker Mettling for helping to organize the reading that kicked it off. I'm generally kind of terrified of reading in public, and although those three hastily-downed Dixie cups of wine might have been partially responsible, this reading actually felt really good. Which got me to thinking about why I and most of the writers I know (poets especially) hate giving public readings, and what we might do to change it.

I think it has something to do with the kind of events most of us are used to attending, as well as the way we're used to absorbing narratives in a public setting. In our generation at least, most of our exposure to the arts comes in two forms that go by the same name: shows (music) and shows (art). Which, when you think about it, are primarily social events. When you go see a band, you don't just sit down and quietly listen to music for an hour, at least not usually. You mingle, talk with your friends, heckle/banter and laugh at other people's heckling/banter. That's why shows are so much fun. And yes, the band is important, but the experience of seeing, say, Dark Dark Dark in your friend's kitchen is way better than seeing them at AS220, regardless of how well they play.

Visual art shows, especially your friend's art shows, are all about the mingling. The pleasure of seeing their work gets compounded by the pleasure of seeing everyone you know enjoying it along with you. And when you're looking at a painting, the artist isn't holding it up for you and demanding that you look at it for a certain amount of time. That would be wicked awkward. You look at it until you're satisfied, then move on. The problem with readings is that neither of these aspects - the vocal sharing aspect and the free use of your time aspect - are present. You sit there quietly until whoever is reading decides to stop. And as a reader, it's hard not to be aware of this dynamic. Regardless of how much confidence you have about your work, you know that some people just aren't going to be into it, and it feels weird to command attention in a way that's so foreign to the ways in which you otherwise interact with your community.

Lots of people get around this by being funny or shocking. This could have something to do with how public storytelling occurs right now - generally in the form of stand-up comedy. Of course, not all writing can or should be funny. When I read at Walker's twenty-second story event almost two years ago, I was a little freaked out about being the un-funny one in a setting in which laughter was the number one form of crowd appreciation. This time around I decided to ride the line on one story, and for the others I decided I just didn't care. And in the end I felt okay about it.

The point is, I think the reason I felt ok had a lot to do with structure of the reading itself. We each took turns reading stories of 100 words or less. This kept it lively, mixed it up, and prevented me at least from getting overly nervous. It also put a kind of frame around us, so that it felt as if the show as a whole was the entertaining part, and not necessarily (or not entirely) the individual performers. Which isn't to say that we - the performers - weren't entertaining. Obviously Sarah Reiter, Jacob Berendes, and Matthew Lawrence are entertaining the second they open their mouths, script or no script, and I thought all of the stories were totally awesome. But there was a kind of variety show aspect to the whole thing which made it a little more like a show (music) and a little less like your average reading. I felt like people came for the event because it was an event, not just a live version of something they could read on paper. And as a reader I felt something closer to the adrenaline rush I've gotten from playing in bands than the weird disembodied nervousness I get when giving poetry readings. Of course, I wasn't reading poetry. Maybe that's all it is in the end. Or maybe Walker Mettling is a genius. Or maybe Micky should offer her retelling of the Batman saga at every reading that happens ever. That would be amazing.

"I am the first suckling among multa, your artifice, your animal, gaudy with cries, gaudy with hunger and lovely with hunger and hunger"

noreply@blogger.com (mary) — Mon, 14 Mar 2011 17:14:00 +0000

The title of this post is a quote from Lisa Robertson, who continues to blow my mind. It's taken from her book Magenta Soul Whip - thank you Karen for lending it to me, and Li for introducing me to her in the first place - and comes from a poem called "Early Education," which begins:

I designed my own passivity. I presented it to you by my face, by your guts, and in the name of human space. I was born into a rough little city, site of hasty invention effectively dissolving into steel sky. The city was a glittering ruin sucked upwards.

...

(Another version of the same beginning is simpler and more direct: in the long science of submission it is the mind that, quietly spectacular, unhooks the bodies and opens the face.)

Another Reading, etc.

noreply@blogger.com (mary) — Sun, 06 Mar 2011 22:00:00 +0000

In case anyone out there loves poetry readings, I'll be reading with a pack of Brown first-year MFA students (poets, fiction writers, e-writers, playwrights) this Tuesday at the McCormick Family Theater in Providence at 7:30 pm. It should be pretty fun, provided I don't actually have to go last as alphabetical order would dictate.

Also, AWP was a crazy time as I expected, but also kind of awesome. Highlights included seeing Susan Howe read twice, Robert Coover's reading, which included a new work that I think was called “going for a drink” or something to that effect, and the off-site reading with folks from Nightboat, Litmus Press and Future Poem. That reading also introduced me to the work of the Japanese writer Ayane Kawata, via Sawako Nakayasu, who translated her book Time of Sky & Castles in the Air. I'd seen Nakayasu read at Brown and love her work, and Ayane Kawata is really something special.

I also saw a reading by Julian T. Brolaski and bought xe's book gowanus atropolis, which is pretty sweet. All in all a good time.

In other news, I finally finished my review of CA Conrad's The Book of Frank, which you can read here. Reviewing books is a weird business that I have not quite figured out yet, so I would urge you not to take my word for it and to just buy the book. It's great.

Reading this Weekend

noreply@blogger.com (mary) — Tue, 01 Feb 2011 16:52:00 +0000

Where: The Washington Monument, Washington DC
When: Sat Feb 5, at 2am
Why: Why not

readers include, or better include, Mark Baumer, Karen Lepri, Amish Trivedi, Mary Wilson, Dongqiao Li, Andrew Bourne, Darren Angle, Aaron Kovalchik, Rachel Cole, Ottessa Moshfegh, Nalini Abhiraman, Micaela Morrissette, Robert Snyderman, Christopher Sweeney, Victoria Le, Sarah Schwartz, David Emanuel, Sarah Tourjee, Susannah Pabot, Ian Hatcher, Helia Rabie,Angela Ferraiolo, & more

http://www.awpwriter.org/conference/2011offsite.php

http://ronsilliman.blogspot.com/2011/02/february-1-in-philadelphia-at-noon.html

the blog is back

noreply@blogger.com (mary) — Tue, 25 Jan 2011 22:19:00 +0000

That's right.

Every six months or so I seem to follow a period of blog-desertion with a "I'm back!" type statement, only to lapse into aforementioned desertion six months later. But such is life. For now I am back, and as for what the future holds, I either don't know or can't tell you because I've sworn secrecy to some Higher Power.

Anyway the update is I'm also back in school (at Brown) for an MFA poetry, which is a thing you can actually go to school for, and lots of people have mixed feelings about it for lots of different reasons. Which are all valid. But from a completely personal perspective I think it's great. I'm happier than I have been in a long time, and (/because) I'm reading and writing more than ever and meeting all kinds of awesome brilliant people, so haters be damned. And as far as MFA programs go, the nice thing about Brown is that there are only five poets per year, and all of us are so drastically and hilariously different that there is really no danger of any “house style” emerging, which I suppose is the main danger of poetry school.

Anyway I have nothing else to say in this post, so I will leave you characteristically with this random video, which I lifted from the blog of CAConrad, a poet whose book (The Book of Frank) I just reviewed. I'll link to the review when it's out, but the preview is: This is the best new book of poetry I've read in a long time. Rivaled only by Jennifer Martenson's Unsound, which I wish I had written. Here is a link to Eileen Myles' review on Jacket, and a preview of the first page of The Book of Frank:

when Frank was born
Father inspected the small package
the nurse handed him

“but where’s my daughter’s cunt?
my daughter has no cunt!”

Mother leaned from the bed
“this is your awful son Dear
your son has no cunt”

“why doesn’t my son have a cunt?
what has happened?
what a WICKED world!
DARK!
and spinning
on its one
good leg!”

On that note, here is a totally unrelated video:

So

noreply@blogger.com (mary) — Thu, 15 Jul 2010 16:08:00 +0000

Should I do it?

noreply@blogger.com (mary) — Sun, 03 Jan 2010 04:02:00 +0000

Death Bigots

noreply@blogger.com (mary) — Tue, 01 Dec 2009 03:51:00 +0000

I wrote this dude an angry letter. You should too. (The governor of Rhode Island, not Stephen Colbert. Silly.)

http://www.colbertnation.com/the-colbert-report-videos/256012/november-16-2009/the-word---skeletons-in-the-closet

Right vs. Left

noreply@blogger.com (mary) — Tue, 10 Nov 2009 07:11:00 +0000

Thomas Pynchon Tattoo Contest Eventually Anounced

noreply@blogger.com (mary) — Thu, 06 Aug 2009 21:25:00 +0000

If they can get you asking the wrong questions, they don't have to worry about answers.
-Thomas Pynchon

The other day it came belatedly to my attention that Thomas Pynchon, a writer to whom I am forever bound by a highly controversial tattoo decision, made and executed within 24 hours in 2003 during a particularly manic/adrenal freak out induced by one nasty case of "cold turkey" nicotine withdrawal and sanctioned by then-boyfriend J. Rabidou (for real!), has come out with a new novel, apparently a plot driven a fair in the style of The Crying of Lot 49 and Vineland.

This, as far as I'm concerned, is wonderful news. To those who swear by the more meandering style of Gravity's Rainbow, either out of genuine preference, literary taste or an honest desire to prove their intelligence, I would beg you to give Lot 49 a second chance. I'm not saying it's better, exactly, but I do agree and then some with Ms. Carolyn Kellogg, who writes in a recent review that "having a plot doesn't make (Pynchon's) work any less brilliant, any less Pynchonian." In fact, I'm going to go out on a limb and say that Pynchon's plots, when he really stick to them, are some of the best I've read.

The "typical" Pynchon plot combines absurdly fortuitous collisions of people and events, strings them together with the hair-brained logic of a physics professor turned conspiracy theorist, and then allows the whole thing to fall apart in an indeterminate morass of loose ends, potential insanity and dirty Broadway lyrics. This, in my opinion, does far more to interrogate the narrative form than do the legions of asyntactic purists who are too avant-garde to even touch it.

Okay, maybe not legions, exactly. Handfuls. A militia, perhaps. Point being, I'm psyched to read this new book. Which is not to say that I don't love me some high modernism, and haven't been guilty of using the words "plot driven" derisively on more than one occasion, but whatever. Nobody is that consistent.

Speaking of consistency and Thomas Pynchon, if anyone reading this is considering getting a tattoo that anyone would ever have an opinion on, please don't do it. I recently spent most of a weekend in Williamsburg, for God knows what reason, and got more tattoo comments per block than I gotten in two years at a liberal arts college. Some of you may say I brought this on myself, which is fair. But when you consider that my zone up to the point of getting the tattoo was primarily Worcester - where hipsters, literary enthusiasts and pretension in general are almost if not completely unheard of, you have to believe me when I say that I had no idea how many people had read this book. No idea. But now, thanks to ye-olde tat, I have a very good idea. Not only that, but I know exactly what they think of it. Why don't people realize that when they comment on your tattoo, they become one of 10 million people who have commented on your tattoo? This weekend someone at the Bacon exhibit even told me he was planning on getting one himself. Dude from the Met, if you're reading this, don't do it. or at least consider, if you will, the following cautionary tale.

Part II

Bought? Or loyal, for free, for fun, to some grandiose practical joke he'd cooked up, all for her embarrassment, or terrorizing, or moral improvement?

Have you ever worked a customer service job where you had to watch large numbers of people respond to a certain stimulus in the exact same way, over and over again? Let me give you an example. When I was working at a certain historical ruined penitentiary in Philly, people would always want to see Al Capone's old cell. they could never quite figure out the map of the place -- which is understandable -- so tour guides would be stationed at various points around the site to point them in the right direction. One of these points was literally 15 feet away from the cell in question, which was lit up and marked by a big placard that read "Al Capone." and the sole responsibility of the tour guide stationed here was to point people to it. so every few days I would sit there, book in hand, somewhat dizzying from the the fine blend of lead paint dust, mold and asbestos that filled the air, and perform this most sacred of tasks. What drove me completely apeshit about the situation was not the fact that people always missed the sign and needed to ask for directions. No, it was the way they would ask. Each time it was the same. After some mumbling, one (usually male) member of the party would break loose and approach me, pause, straighten himself up and pronounce the word "Capone?" To which I would reply, like an asshole, "You're looking for Al Capone's cell? Straight ahead." It was kind of like the way I now answer the question "what kinds of coffee do you have?" ie: " You mean what flavor?" French vanilla is not a kind of coffee. It's a perversion of coffee. And Capone is not a question, it's a proper noun. I may be a snob, but customer service jobs are the pits and we all do what we can to get by. At least I didn't say "no, I'm Mary" or "Capone's not here now. Died of syphilis a few years back."

Okay, so that was a bit of a tangent. Let's bring it back. Take the aforementioned scene, it's maddening, unavoidable repetitions, and attach it not to your source of employment, but to... your body. That's right. FOREVER. I get a total of three comments on my tattoo. Here they are, in order of frequency.

Scenario 1: Most People.

Them: what's your tattoo of?
Me: it's a trumpet with a mute in it.
Them: what does it symbolize?
Me. (Sick of repeating odd title twice - see above anecdote) It's a long story.
Them: you play the trumpet?
Me: no.
Them: your boyfriend play the trumpet?
Me: Yeah. My boyfriend plays the trumpet.

Scenario 2. Most Privileged Lit/Art People

Them: Cool! Awesome W.A.S.T.E. symbol!
Me. (Embarrassed)

Scenario 3. Most Overly Privileged Lit/Art People

See above scenario, add sarcasm.

One guy actually said "wow, you must be really smart." Dude, it's 155 pages. And it's fucking good. Get over it. Anyway if you're still reading I'm hereby starting a contest via this blog to redesign my tattoo. I'm thinking something like a cocktail glass or maybe some kind of fancy ray gun or something. Anything that isn't a black rectangle because that would be a cop out. I had a friend who accidentally aka drunkenly got a crucifix tattoo in Mexico, and when he realized what happened he went back to the guy and asked him to make it into something else. He ended up with a weird looking dagger that had a snake coiled around it. It was awesome. So think big. Send me pictures. I'm for serious.

Rabies vs. the Local News

noreply@blogger.com (mary) — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 14:04:00 +0000

Our neighbor down the street from my mom's house just got attacked by a rabid fox, which totally sucks. She's 78 and a total sweetheart. Still, the resulting T&G article about the hometown hero who saved her is kind of amazing. That was one crazy malicious fox.

Quote: “I just ran up and punted it off of her.”

The price of growing up near a small urban woods is that your block is where all the rabid raccoons, skunks, possums etc. come to have their last hurrah and get shot by the cops. We were always running into (and away from) raccoons when I was a kid, and then one year it got so bad that they hunted them all down and killed them, rabid or not. I haven't seen a raccoon around there in years.

Rabies though is some crazy shit. I read an article a while ago that speculated, based on his symptoms, that Edgar Allen Poe died of rabies.

Historical accounts of his hospitalization indicate that at first he was delirious with tremors and hallucinations, then he slipped into a coma. He emerged from the coma, was calm and lucid, but then lapsed again into a delirious state, became combative, and required restraint. He died on his fourth day in the hospital. According to an account published in the Maryland Historical Magazine in December 1978, the Baltimore Commissioner of Health, Dr. J.F.C. Handel certified that the cause of Poe's death was "congestion of the brain."

He was also reluctant to drink any water and refused alcohol - the other purported cause of his death.

Poe had it rough. After his death in 1849 he was buried in an unmarked grave until someone complained to one of his relatives in 1860. At that point his relative ordered a tombstone engraved, but then a train near the stone yard ran off the tracks and destroyed the tombstone, (!) which was marble, and very expensive, and the relative couldn't afford another one. So Poe hung out until 1965, when a group of citizen's started a foundation to raise the money for another tombstone. It took them 7 years.